Imagine that the New York Times
revealed that five Senators were known to be taking bribes from a particular
corporation. Some days later the Washington Post runs a story saying they
had independent sources suggesting that four Senators were taking bribes
from that same corporation but goes on to state that this was nothing new as
the story was already covered, neglecting to mention that three of the four
names were different than those previously reported by the Times. This is
hard to imagine because eight named Senators in a scandal is not the same as
five named Senators, and because healthy competition between papers would
tend to point out the information missed by a rival. Yet, this is, at least
numerically, what happened following the October 22nd, 2010
release of the Iraq War Logs by WikiLeaks.

The release which supposedly
included over 391,000 classified DoD reports described violent events after
2003 including 109,000 deaths, the majority (66,000) being Iraqi
civilians. At the time of the release, the most commonly cited figure for
civilian casualties came from Iraqbodycount.org (IBC), a group based in
England that compiles press and other descriptions of killings in Iraq. In
late October, IBC estimated the civilian war death tally to be about
104,000. Virtually all authorities, including IBC themselves, acknowledge
that this count must be incomplete, although the fraction missed is
debated. The press coverage of the Iraq War Logs release tended to focus on
the crude consistency between the number recorded by WikiLeaks, 66,000 since
the start of 2004, and the roughly 104,000 recorded deaths from
Iraqbodycount since March of 2003. The Washington Post even ran an
editorial entitled, “WikiLeaks’s leaks mostly confirm earlier Iraq
reporting” concluding that the Iraq War Log reports revealed nothing new.

A research team from the Columbia
University Mailman School of Public Health released a report this week
analyzing the amount of overlap between the 66,000 WikiLeaks reports and the
previously known listing of IBC. The team developed a system for grading
the likelihood that the WikiLeaks War Log record matched an entry in IBC,
scoring the match between 0 (not a match) to 3 (very likely a match). The
matching records were graded by at least two reviewers and then a third
reviewer arbitrated any discrepancies. The conclusion? Only 19% of the
WikiLeaks reports of civilian deaths had been previously recorded by IBC.
With so little overlap between the two lists, it is almost certain that both
tallies combined are missing the majority of civilian deaths, suggesting
many hundreds of thousands have died.

On some level, not noticing that the
WikiLeaks list of 66,000 deaths were different events than those previously
recorded by IBC is somewhat understandable. Reporters have precious few
hours to read, assess, reach out to experts, and then produce copy on the
topic of the day. It takes several minutes to review a particular War Log
and then go to the public database on Iraqbodycount.org and see if on that
specific day there was an event that seems to match the War Log
description. In fact, many papers ran an AP wire article on the WikiLeaks
release so it is likely very few reporters actually looked at the Iraq War
Logs.

On the other hand, WikiLeaks gave
these records in advance to five papers including the New York Times and it
took the Columbia University team just minutes to realize that for most
events reported outside of Baghdad (where matching takes more work) there
were no reported killings in a particular city or province on that day
within IBC’s database.

This is not the first time this
topic has been inadequately covered by the US press. A study I coauthored
in The Lancet in estimating 100,000 excess deaths by September of 2004 (an
estimate confirmed three times since then) received extraordinary press
coverage almost everywhere in the world, but almost none within the US.
Project Censored cited the topic of Iraqi civilian deaths as the second most
under-reported topic of 2004. A survey by researchers from Johns Hopkins
University suggested there had been 600,000 deaths due to the invasion by
mid-2006. A poll by the Opinion Research Business in late 2007 put the tally
over 1 million. Both estimates were viciously attacked by critics, largely
supported by experts in their respective disciplines, but consistently
labeled as “controversial” by the press.

The implications of the WikiLeaks
Iraq War Logs for the US standing in the Middle-East are profound. The only
public estimate of the Iraqi death toll ever provided by the US was
President Bush’s response at a public forum in December of 2005 in which he
said, "I would say 30,000 more or less have died as a result of the initial
incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis," with the Whitehouse
spokesmen later attributing this estimate to media accounts. This number
matched the IBC estimate at that time. WikiLeaks’ War Logs suggest the US
had information to know that this estimate was only a small fraction of the
reality.

Les Roberts is a Clinical Associate
Professor in the Program on Forced Migration and Health at Columbia
University.